


soup is a lot like family

by lazyfish



Series: Genuary 2021 [12]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Soup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 17:00:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29085756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lazyfish/pseuds/lazyfish
Summary: When everyone else on the base is down with the flu, Hunter and Coulson make soup.
Relationships: Phil Coulson & Lance Hunter
Series: Genuary 2021 [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2087955
Comments: 17
Kudos: 24





	soup is a lot like family

“Looks like everyone else is down for the count,” Hunter says as he trudges back into Coulson’s office. “Let’s hope the world decides not to end today.” It would be awfully inconvenient for another cataclysmic event to happen when the rest of the team has the flu and is in no shape to be standing up, let alone attempting to fire a gun.

“I was afraid of that,” Coulson sighs. “I suppose I’ll give you the day off, then.”

Hunter snorts. “Does it really count as a day off if I’m going to spend all of it running around and making sure everyone has what they need?” With Jemma also not feeling well, there’s no one to fuss over the rest of the team and make sure they’re all following proper illness protocol - no one, that is, except for Hunter.

“I guess not.” Coulson’s mouth curves into a smile. “We should do something nice for them. Maybe make some chicken noodle soup soup.”

“Soup!” Hunter repeats enthusiastically. “I’ll draw up the grocery list!”

“You need a list to remember to buy soup and crackers?”

“Oh.” Hunter pauses. “I was going to make the soup from scratch.”

“You know how to do that?”

Hunter tries not to be offended by Coulson’s surprise. “Soup is my specialty.”

“I thought that only applied to the mushroom kind.”

Hunter chuckles. “Mushroom’s just the one Bob likes the best. But I can do others.”

“Alright.” Coulson looks him up and down before nodding. “Make the list, then. We’ll leave in ten.”

\---

“I have to ask,” Coulson says as they begin chopping vegetables to make the stock for their chicken noodle soup. “Where’d you learn to make soup? That doesn’t strike me as a necessary skill in the army.”

“My mum,” Hunter answers, whacking a carrot clean in half. “She and my dad only knew how to talk through food, and I reckon chicken noodle soup was the closest they got to saying _I love you_.”

“Ah.” Coulson finishes the turnip he’d been cubing, throwing it into the pot with the chicken and Hunter’s carrot.

“And your parents?” Hunter prods after a moment. “They didn’t make soup?”

“We had a lot of Campbell’s.” Coulson shrugs. “After my dad died my mom was working a lot, and she couldn’t really afford to spend hours on making one meal. Even soup.”

“Makes sense.” Hunter pauses. “That’s why I don’t cook much around here, you know? It doesn’t seem worthwhile to start something that takes hours if I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish it.”

“Do you miss cooking?”

Hunter considers it for a long moment. “I don’t miss the actual cooking. Just the bit that comes after. Getting to spend time with someone eating a meal, knowing I made something for them out of love.”

“There’s more than one way to say you love someone, isn’t there?” Coulson asks, undoubtedly thinking of his mother and how her canned soup had been just as much of an _I love you_ as Hunter’s mum’s homemade batch.

“I mean, I’m rubbish at that bit. Which I’m sure you’ve guessed.”

Coulson hums, and it’s odd that Hunter’s never considered what Coulson humming would sound like. He’s never thought of Coulson as all that musically inclined - though Bob had once mentioned a woman who played the cello was in some way linked to the director.

“No comment?” Hunter prods.

“I think you sell yourself short,” Coulson answers as he pulls apart a head of celery and gives it a few rough drops. “You surprised everyone, you know.”

“That’s because you lot didn’t want to believe a merc could be any good,” Hunter says, waving the knife perhaps a bit too nonchalantly considering he and Coulson are the only two healthy people on the base. If anything goes wrong in this kitchen, they have to handle it themselves. 

“That’s fair.”

“Iz never underestimated me.” The words slip out before Hunter can help them. “She loved chicken noodle soup, you know. Would eat it every day if Idaho and I let her.”

“I didn’t know that,” Coulson says as he throws the last of the vegetables into the pot. Hunter follows with a handful of peppercorns and a head of garlic he’d lopped in quarters earlier. Coulson drags the pot over to the sink, where they fill it with water until the chicken is submerged.

“Crank it up,” Hunter advises when Coulson slides the pot onto the stove. “That much stock is going to take forever to heat.”

“And everyone’s going to want to eat dinner before midnight,” Coulson agrees.

“Worse comes to worse we can just give them the canned stuff, right?”

Coulson smiles. “Right.”

“If you have directorial things to do, I can sit here and watch it,” Hunter offers. He never knows what exactly Coulson is doing behind the closed door of his office, but keeping an organization like S.H.I.E.L.D. running can’t be an easy job. 

“I can take the day off,” Coulson says. He gestures with his head towards the rarely-used kitchen table. “I’d like to hear more about Hartley, if you don’t mind sharing.”

Hunter blinks. He can’t remember the last time someone else on the team had asked him about Iz and Idaho. The day they died his life had been turned upside down in more ways than one, but it had barely been a blip on the radar for anyone else. They had moved on, and Hunter had been forced to by everything happening around him. There’d barely been time to breathe, let alone grieve.

Better late than never, he supposes.

“I think you would’ve liked her,” Hunter says as he settles himself in his chair. He almost feels like he needs a beer so they can have a proper bonding-type conversation. “She reminds me a lot of May, if May were more… crass.”

Coulson’s smile brightens, and Hunter files the reaction away for later. He had thought mentioning May when she had taken off would be a sore spot, but Coulson seems… fine. More fine than Hunter would be if his best friend scarpered.

“Tell me how you two met,” Coulson prompts.

“It’s the middle of the winter, and I’m in Montana on an op…”

\---

The time fades away as Hunter and Coulson continue to trade stories. First it had been mostly about Izzy, but then Coulson had moved on to stories about May, and then Fury, which had somehow meandered into Hunter gesticulating wildly while recounting the story of the time he met one of Great Britain’s top generals. Their conversation only ends, rather abruptly, when Daisy shuffles into the kitchen.

“Something smells good,” she mumbles, producing a packet of tissues from some hidden pocket in her suit to blow her nose with comical volume.

“We’re making soup!” Hunter says. “We should probably check on that, huh?”

Coulson nods, following Hunter to the kitchen and handing him the meat thermometer he had spent the better part of two hours looking for the first time he’d tried making food in the base’s kitchen.

Maybe being director came with super finding powers?

Hunter stuck the meat thermometer into the chicken’s breast and, satisfied it had reached the correct temperature, plucked the bird out of the pot.

Coulson slides a cutting board onto the counter without a word and hands Hunter one of the knives they’d previously used to chop the vegetables. Luckily it’s sharp enough that when Hunter slices down the breastbone of the bird the meat separates easily. He sets the breasts aside and throws the rest of the carcass back into the pot to continue simmering; the dark meat will need longer to get tender.

“When’s it going to be done?” Daisy sniffles.

“Forty-five minutes, maybe an hour?”

She groans. “Call me when it’s ready. And enjoy your bro time.”

“Bro time?” Coulson repeats when Daisy has shuffled out of earshot.

“Don’t ask me,” Hunter says with a shrug. He’s enjoyed talking with Coulson for the past… Christ, has it really been two hours? Regardless of how long it’s been, though, Hunter isn’t sure it counts as _bro_ time. Coulson is not, and likely never will be, a _bro_.

“She’s funny,” Coulson muses.

“Funny isn’t the word I’d used,” Hunter says, cocking his head slightly. He doesn’t know how to describe Daisy, but funny isn’t at the top of his list. Maybe badass? It feels a little ridiculous, since basically every woman S.H.I.E.L.D. employs is badass in her own special way. 

“She’s the only adult I know who would use a blanket as a cape.”

“In public,” Hunter adds. He knows for a fact Bobbi’s got a blanket wrapped around her shoulders at this exact moment, and he’s not above some cape-blanket action for himself when he’s in the privacy of his own quarters.

“In public,” Coulson agrees.

“You want to make the noodles now, so they’ll be ready when the rest of the soup is?”

“We’re making the noodles?”

“When the Hunter family says _from scratch_ , we mean it.”

Coulson gives him a mildly apprehensive look, but then shrugs. “When in Rome, I guess.”

“When in Kent. Though really we’re not in either of those places.”

The joke pulls a chuckle out of Coulson. “What do we need?”

They gather the ingredients (there’s only five - flour, milk, butter, eggs, and salt) and get to work creating the pasta. Instead of talking about their colleagues, the conversation slides back to their families. 

“What else would your mother cook?”

“Honestly? Just soup.” Hunter snorts to himself as he begins kneading the pasta dough. “Most of the stereotypes about British cooking are unfortunately true and soup is the only thing I’d ever ask her to make, because it didn’t taste like piss.”

“Maybe I was fortunate my mom didn’t try to cook, then. I don’t think American food is much better.”

“Say, do you lot really have fried butter? I swear it’s just a story someone made up to pull my leg but -”

“Oh, it’s real,” Coulson interrupts. “We’d go down to the Iowa State Fair every year when I was little and they had giant sticks of fried butter. And fried everything else, too. We really _will_ fry everything.”

“Even hamburgers?”

Coulson ponders. “I don’t think I’ve seen a fried hamburger, but that doesn’t mean much.”

Hunter shakes his head and goes back to making his pasta before he can make a comment that will get him fired - though he’s beginning to doubt Coulson would fire him for an anti-America sentiment. Maybe an anti- _Captain_ America sentiment, but even Hunter isn’t brave enough to say something negative about Steve Rogers where Coulson can hear him.

By the time they finish the noodles, the soup is almost finished. Hunter strains out everything from the stock while Coulson works on shredding both the breast meat they’d taken off earlier and the rich dark meat that had finished cooking while the soup simmered. Whatever smell had brought Daisy to the kitchen had multiplied tenfold; the whole kitchen was warm and the scent of roasting chicken and vegetables gave the air a delightfully umami edge.

They put some fresh veggies into the stock along with a fair amount of herbs and enough salt that Jemma would’ve swooned if she was there. 

“Taste test,” Hunter says, holding a spoonful of broth out to Coulson. 

He slurps it loudly before declaring, “Perfect.”

They plunk the noodles into the broth for their frighteningly short cooking time before beginning to ladle the soup into bowls. They don’t have any trays, but giving each agent a bowl and a plate with a few saltines should be more than enough.

“Hunter?” Coulson asks as they begin making their way down the corridor with their first round of deliveries.

“Yes, sir?”

“I think we should do this again sometime.”

Hunter smiles. Even if making the soup was a long, intense process, it was more fun than he expected to share the time with someone other than his mother. It didn’t feel like he was trying to replace her - if anything, Hunter thought his mum would be happy he had found friends who cared enough to make soup with him. He rolled his eyes internally; even in his head his mum was still fussing over him. 

“I would like that, sir. I would like that a lot.”


End file.
